0:00:00[Music]
0:00:11From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, episode number 79.
0:00:16Upgrade is brought to you this week by the good people at Casper, premium mattresses on the Internet,
0:00:21Squarespace, beautiful websites, I guess. I'm gonna make that one up.
0:00:26Mail route filtering spam and bounce mail out from your mail before it even
0:00:30gets to your server. I'm Jason Snell, I don't normally read that part because
0:00:34Myke Hurley is usually here, but Myke Hurley is in transit from America where
0:00:38he attended Matt Alexander's wedding in Dallas this weekend and he is on the way
0:00:44back to London. So I have brought in one of my special guest hosts to join me for
0:00:49this week's edition of Upgrading. You know him from, among other places, the
0:00:53Accidental Tech podcast and Reconcilable Differences as well as, of course, many appearances on
0:00:58The Incomparable. Mr. John Syracuse, hello!
0:01:01I was disappointed. I thought you were going to do the accent.
0:01:04Oh, I can't. Oh, no. That would be really bad. My English—I'm not prepared to do my
0:01:09English accent and I can't do a Myke Hurley impression. That I really can't do. I can
0:01:13do some fake English accents that I learned from watching BBC shows when I was in high
0:01:17school, but I don't think I could do an impression of Myke. Hello, mate! That's about all I got.
0:01:23We can work on that. We can work on that together.
0:01:25All right. Well, that was what Myke and I—that was our code. "Hello, mate. This is a podcast."
0:01:31That's it. That's all I got. Do some Spinal Tap lines. Do some Princess Bride lines. That's
0:01:36about it. That's all I got. Those are fake accents, too.
0:01:40So normally in the show, we do follow-up/follow-out. I know that these are not entirely approved
0:01:47terms by John Siracusa, but there it is. I wanted to mention that we did—you and I,
0:01:53along with a bunch of other interesting people did an episode of The Incomparable that posted
0:01:57this weekend about Firewatch, the game from Campo Santo and published by Panic. And people
0:02:02should listen to it if they want to hear. Yeah, they might want to hear what I have
0:02:05to say about it or Tiffany Arment or Brian Hamilton or Tony Sindelar or you. See, that's
0:02:14the big piece there. You also, that is your like official, so far your official statement.
0:02:20Runde Caldwell's on that too, although she had the flu and so she was very tired. That's
0:02:24your official statement about Firewatch so far is episode 290 of The Incomparable.
0:02:28Yeah, I think we covered it all. Like, I don't think there's a need for me to talk about
0:02:34it in any other podcast. I think I haven't listened to the episode yet, but I felt good
0:02:38after it was done. I felt like everybody got, you know, their opinions out there.
0:02:42Yeah, I think so. I think so. I think it worked out pretty well. And it's a good game. People
0:02:48should play it. It's reasonably priced. My understanding is on most modern Macs it will
0:02:52play fairly well. You may have to crank down the settings, the frame rate may be kind of
0:02:57low but it's playable and if you've got a PS4 you can buy it and play it there too.
0:03:03And I'm fond because I'm not somebody who invests dozens of hours of time like you do
0:03:07in something like Destiny. I'm never going to play a game like that for all of those
0:03:13hundreds of hours. I love these short games that take, they're sort of like movie length.
0:03:20They're a little bit longer, but I think I played Firewatch in like three hours, three
0:03:24and a half hours or something like that, and it was a great experience and I was happy
0:03:28that I had done it when I got to the end. And I might play it through again, I'm actually
0:03:32hoping that my wife will play it through and maybe I'll watch while she does that. But
0:03:36I love those, I love these short games that are, you can tell a story and have an experience
0:03:41and get to the end and not have it invested, you know, a week or two of your life.
0:03:45That's the key that you you will be able to get to the end. Like, for the most part,
0:03:50if you can make it five minutes into this game, you will be able to get to the end.
0:03:53You will not find yourself thwarted by, like, "I started playing this game and then it got
0:03:57too hard and I couldn't." Yeah, it's not one of those games.
0:04:00You'll make it through. Can you move around in a 3D world? I mean,
0:04:02if you can move around, like... Yeah, I mean, that is a barrier, to be fair,
0:04:06but if you make it past the first five or ten minutes, you'll be fine. And you'll be
0:04:10sucked into it and you should block out three hours to play to play it straight through
0:04:14because it's fun. It's a page turner of a game if that makes sense.
0:04:17Yeah, and people were asking about the incomparable episode, they said, "Are there spoilers?"
0:04:21And I think we did a pretty good job. If you want to be completely unspoiled about the
0:04:27game, you shouldn't listen to the episode until you've played it. If you—we talk
0:04:31about things that sound like they could be major spoilers, but I feel like they aren't
0:04:36because they're things that happen in the first couple of minutes of the game, so they
0:04:40aren't spoilers for the game play, they're just spoilers for the premise of the game,
0:04:46which is, I feel like, a different kind of spoiler. And when we get to the point where
0:04:49we start talking about what happens at the end of the game, we blow the spoiler horn.
0:04:53But it depends on how lightly do you want to be spoiled going into it. We do talk about
0:05:00it a lot before we get into the "what happens" part of the story.
0:05:04story. Yeah, and to some degree, if you have no awareness of the game, you have to at least
0:05:09like read a summary somewhere, start reading a summary to know what kind of game is this.
0:05:14But if you don't really care and you just want to take our word for it, going in cold
0:05:17is always fun. It's like going into a movie that you, you know, maybe you've never seen
0:05:20an ad for it, never seen a poster, know nothing about it, and you just show up. And sometimes
0:05:26that can be fun. I saw the demo at XOXO, which was really interesting because it's, um,
0:05:34I knew part of the game but not the beginning because the demo is a part
0:05:42where you're sent on a mission because you see some fireworks. You know the part
0:05:46I'm talking about. You have to go investigate by the lake.
0:05:48What's the source of the fireworks and get those people to stop shooting off
0:05:51those fireworks. But watching the game I had no idea of the backstory of the
0:05:56character and that's the first five or ten minutes of the game is this
0:05:59backstory of how this person ends up, who you are playing, ends up out in the
0:06:03the wilderness. And so it was kind of fun to go through that, because I was like, "Oh,
0:06:07that's why he's out here!" Because that part I hadn't seen. I'd seen a chunk from sort
0:06:11of like the 20-minute mark in the game, not from the very beginning.
0:06:17That's always a challenge for those games. Like, if you're going to give a demo, what
0:06:19do you demo? Because it's very difficult to--you don't want to spoil the game by demoing it,
0:06:26but you do want to show people what the game is like, and usually don't have time or money
0:06:30to make a custom segment that's not actually in the game that merely shows, I don't know,
0:06:35what the game would be like.
0:06:36Right. That mini-game that I want, where all you do is stand there and look for fires in
0:06:42the wilderness.
0:06:43That is not what the game is like, though.
0:06:45That is not like the world's slowest arcade game, where you're there for an entire summer.
0:06:50It's not like desert golfing.
0:06:53It rolls out in real time, so you literally have to be there for an entire summer.
0:06:56Yeah. And on day 31, there's a little puff of smoke, and you're like, "Oh, is that
0:06:59No, that's nothing. And then the rest of the summer passes. That's not what the game is. It's not like that at all.
0:07:05Anyway, it's a good game. We all liked it.
0:07:10We had criticisms because, you know, nothing is so perfect, as somebody told me, that it cannot be criticized.
0:07:16But I think totally worth playing, and since there's a Mac version of it, if you've got a Mac that's at all modern,
0:07:21you should be able to play it, which is nice.
0:07:27I also had a little bit of follow-out for ATP, the latest episode, 159, which I started
0:07:34listening to live and then I had to make dinner for my family and then it turns out I tuned
0:07:40out just as my name was being mentioned, which is hilarious because I totally missed that
0:07:44part. I could have been there when it happened. Because you were talking about my Ethernet
0:07:51port dying the other week with the Stealth software update where they banned, Apple banned
0:07:56its own Ethernet driver from activating, which I figured out because I have my Ethernet connected
0:08:03to a Thunderbolt breakout box, and I thought something had happened to the Thunderbolt
0:08:09box, like it had died, so I plugged the Ethernet into my iMac and it still didn't work and
0:08:13I thought, "Okay, that is creepy." Like, I got another cable and plugged it in and that
0:08:18one didn't work either, and then I was completely mystified about what was going on for a while
0:08:22there so but you know it's all good now I got my ethernet back and I actually
0:08:29leave my Wi-Fi turned off because there's an annoying bug in OS X where
0:08:33sometimes even though Ethernet is prioritized over Wi-Fi sometimes the
0:08:41Wi-Fi seems to just decide it's going to be used instead and so I'll be copying a
0:08:48you know, 20 gigabyte podcast folder to my server, and I have gigabit Ethernet,
0:08:56and it will and I will find that it's transferring it really slowly. And it's
0:09:00because it's it's using Wi Fi instead. So I generally leave my Wi Fi turned off,
0:09:04because that's the one way that I can force my computer to always use the
0:09:08Ethernet. But as a result, when my Ethernet ports died, I knew immediately
0:09:12because I was off the internet. And all my audio plugins with their annoying
0:09:17DRM that have the phone home to make sure that you're authorized. They're all based
0:09:22— not only could they not get on the internet, they're all based on your ethernet ID, apparently.
0:09:28And it couldn't see my ethernet cards, essentially, my ethernet hardware on any of my ethernet
0:09:35devices attached to the system. So they all failed, too. I didn't get any editing done
0:09:40on my Mac.
0:09:41I always leave the Wi-Fi turned off for that exact reason. And also, around the same time
0:09:46this bug happened, one of my ethernet switches went bad. As far as I'm able to determine,
0:09:51it really did go bad because it didn't not see the ethernet port, it was there, and it
0:09:57would sort of work when I would reboot my switch. It would appear to work for a second,
0:10:00but then it would become disconnected and then I would watch my switch reset. Anyway,
0:10:03I think I actually really did have a bad switch, but it was kind of weird that I had an ethernet
0:10:07problem at the same time that other people were having to disable my ethernet driver
0:10:12Yeah, wired internet. It's still a thing. It's still, I mean, the speed I get with
0:10:19that gigabit Ethernet, it's so great. I copy these huge files and they copy so fast.
0:10:25It's amazing. I love it. And I'm still a little baffled about why the system tries
0:10:32to use the deprioritized network adapter. Like, it's down at the bottom of the list.
0:10:38really don't use Wi-Fi and it's still finder copies will still happen with
0:10:44Wi-Fi and you know you can't tell if it's a small file but when it's one of
0:10:47those 20 gigabyte folders and it says this will take 40 minutes and you're
0:10:51like that's that's too long it should take less time but I don't know there's
0:10:58something there it must I don't I'm mystified about it because it's not like
0:11:01my ethernet connection goes up and down it's always there it's solid I can see
0:11:07the cable, you know? And yet it'll be like, "I'm just gonna use Wi-Fi now. That'll be
0:11:12fun. Let's throw these bits in the air just for kicks."
0:11:16Yeah, I have no idea why it does that either. I mean, I've seen the same thing, and you
0:11:21know, in fact, I get to the point now where I don't trust the ordering at all. If I see
0:11:25the little fan symbol in the menu bar because I've forgotten to turn it off, I just immediately
0:11:30turn it off. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. The only problem is
0:11:37handoff stuff. Although handoff stuff is, I think some of the handoff stuff now works
0:11:45even when you're on Ethernet, if you've got Ethernet and Bluetooth. Like it'll say, "Oh,
0:11:49you're on the network and you've got Bluetooth." But in Yosemite, I know that I couldn't use
0:11:54handoff with anything if I had Wi-Fi turned off. So if I wanted to handoff something,
0:11:59I had to like, it kind of destroyed the purpose of having a convenient way to do handoff,
0:12:04is I would have to go turn Wi-Fi on and then hand something off and then turn it back off,
0:12:08which is dumb. Oh well. Anyway, that wasn't even my follow-up. My follow-up was that you
0:12:14talked about HFS Plus. I don't know if I have that ding sound effect that I can put in that
0:12:19Marco always puts in for ATP. But I just, I loved you talking about HFS Plus and the
0:12:27the whole story behind how if you attached an HFS+ drive to a Mac, and this is Mac OS
0:12:338.1, right, that this happened. It was like 1998. And if you attached an HFS+ to a Mac
0:12:43that didn't support HFS+, it had that little like teach text file that was basically, "Here's
0:12:52why you can't see what's on this disk." And you could open it and it would tell you,
0:12:56it was just baked into the format was this kind of fake, old-style HFS disk
0:13:02that had this one file in it. But what was really funny and also kind of sobering
0:13:08in terms of how long ago this was and that I remember it is that was right
0:13:11when I started at Macworld. I started Macworld in late '97 and I remember the
0:13:15briefing that we had about 8/1 where they had a whole like white paper
0:13:19about HFS+. They came into the Macworld offices and this was back in the time
0:13:23when Apple executives came to computer magazines because Apple was not, you know,
0:13:32in great shape and like extolled the virtues of their updates and stuff. So we
0:13:37had like Phil Schiller, I'm not sure if he was in that briefing, he might have
0:13:41been. I definitely remember Phil Schiller coming in for OS X briefings,
0:13:45you know, schlepping up to San Francisco and coming to presumably all
0:13:50of the magazines and sitting down and doing a demo of what they were doing with the operating
0:13:55system. And I definitely remember, I remember the room it was in that we had that briefing
0:14:00for OS 8.1 and HFS Plus, and they were talking about how excited, exciting it was that they
0:14:05had this new update to the file system, and it was going to be the Mac OS extended format,
0:14:11and it was going to offer all of these possibilities and possibilities for the future. And I remember
0:14:16at the time, it was just sort of like, okay, this new file system, that's a little wrinkle,
0:14:20But I would never have guessed that 18 years later we would still be using it on all of
0:14:29our computers.
0:14:3118 years later it's still just HFS+.
0:14:33I think that when they made OS X or when they make these grand new things, they're like,
0:14:38"We believe this is going to be the foundation for the Mac platform for the next 15 years,"
0:14:42or something like that.
0:14:43Even then they don't say like 18 to 20.
0:14:45Maybe they said 20, I don't know.
0:14:47like the sort of grand vision of like we are setting the foundation for you know the next
0:14:51era. And this was just like now you can have big volumes and your block size won't be
0:14:56humongous. Well yeah and they didn't even have this was not even in the you know this
0:15:00was the what this was the very beginning of the Steve Jobs return era but really this
0:15:08was obviously in the works for before Steve got there this was before the next acquisition
0:15:13happened that they were working on this thing. And all our devices still have it. Now, it's
0:15:19not like they didn't add stuff, right? They added journaling at one point, and of course,
0:15:24there was that question of whether this was going to be the file system that OS X used,
0:15:28which ultimately, yeah, it was in the end. But we still have it all this time later.
0:15:35And we're not going to do… Somebody actually asked what we… When I asked what we should
0:15:40talk about on this episode. Somebody said, "Everything that Jon likes to talk about
0:15:44except file systems." Okay, wow. But I wanted to at least reminisce about this a little
0:15:50bit just because this seemingly innocuous briefing that I remember from 1998, and it's
0:15:57still with us today, I just find that mind-boggling. I feel like I've been in the house that I
0:16:03live in forever, and we bought it in 1999, that was 17 years ago. HFS Plus, longer than
0:16:09Wow. Another fun tidbit about HFS+ was it had support
0:16:14for 255 character file names. Up to that point, the Mac had been limited to 32 character file
0:16:19names, so the file system supported it, but the operating system didn't yet. So they could
0:16:23kind of sort of brag, like, "Oh, we've extended HFS+ and it has these new features, and you
0:16:29can change these new attributes to let you have larger volume sizes, and you can have
0:16:32255 character files, but not really because the OS doesn't support that yet, but we'll
0:16:35support that soon." So it's like you had a file system that supported a feature, but
0:16:40then an operating system that kept you within 32 character file names, which was just weird.
0:16:44But back then, something like that was the least of Apple's problems. You're like, "Okay,
0:16:49well, at least I suppose in a future update, assuming Apple is still in business, they'll
0:16:53have this thing."
0:16:54We were so beaten down at that point. It's like, "Whatever. Okay. Fine. Great." Yeah,
0:17:02it was a different era.
0:17:03Because Windows had true 255-character file names at that point, and so there was a little
0:17:07bit of a competition there.
0:17:08Yeah, I remember we, you know, you get the Finder and you start to type and you can't,
0:17:12you know, they're like, "Hey, long file name support is here," but you'd still get to what,
0:17:1632 characters, and it would be like, "Boop!
0:17:17Nope, that's it.
0:17:18That's all you get," until they updated the whole OS to support it later.
0:17:24And then, you know, the OS X error, there was all the, like, are they going to support
0:17:29case insensitive or case sensitive and the
0:17:32There's yeah, it's actually kind of a miracle that although they made that huge operating system switch with OS 10
0:17:39They kept the file system. It's
0:17:41Kind of amazing, but yeah, I mean there was the option to install in UFS for a little while
0:17:45I'm the early days of OS 10, but that eventually went by the wayside
0:17:48Yeah, I like how that went too because over time it just got more and more the warnings got more and more dire
0:17:53Do you remember that where it was like you?
0:17:55probably don't want to do this and then I think maybe at one point it was just in the server install it's like well
0:18:00OS X server could do it, but you really don't want to and it's got there are issues
0:18:05But we'll let you and then finally was just like no you know it's OS X extended
0:18:11You know Mac OS extended is required now
0:18:13I had a couple more pieces of follow-up, and then we'll get into our topics I
0:18:20Thought it was um
0:18:22We got we got a note from Michael listener Michael
0:18:25based on last week's show where Myke and I talked about the naming of the iPad and iPad Pro and
0:18:30This seemed this question seemed to have your name written all over it as somebody who used an iPod touch for a very long time
0:18:36Which is if we go to iPad and iPad Pro lines
0:18:39How about the iPad line adding a third size and using that to replace the iPod touch?
0:18:44Could they just change the silkscreen on the back of iPod touch and call it a an iPad?
0:18:51Light or something iPad with the iPad nano iPad nano. Yeah, that's it. Okay. All right
0:18:57I don't know if you have any thoughts about this idea of like do that by for caving the iPad
0:19:02As incredibly confused as the iPod touch
0:19:06product name is
0:19:09I don't think it would be an improvement to call it an iPad because iPad means tablet for everybody and when you see this tiny little
0:19:16Thing you could say whatever you think it might be but it's definitely not a tablet. It's not you know what I mean
0:19:21It's smaller than all of Apple's phones at this point.
0:19:24It's smaller than the phones, exactly. That's exactly it.
0:19:27So why would you do that?
0:19:29Yeah, so Apple will continue to call it the iPod Touch, and customers will continue to call it the iTouch, and that'll be fine.
0:19:36Yep, that's it. I don't know. I kind of have come around to the idea of splitting the iPad line in two.
0:19:48But, yeah, it's still going to be weird if they do it.
0:19:54And I'm not quite sure…
0:19:55What do you mean by "pro" and "non-pro"?
0:19:56Yeah, "pro" and "non-pro."
0:19:57The idea that the things that are the top-of-the-line features are the…
0:20:02I wrote a piece that was on Macworld that I'll put in the show notes about the idea
0:20:07that, yeah, so your pencil support and your smart connector and the top-of-the-line processors
0:20:13basically are in something you call the iPad Pro.
0:20:15if they come in what we think of as the iPad Air size and the iPad Pro size now, and they
0:20:21end up calling those the, you know, whatever, 10 and 13 or some fraction of those versions.
0:20:29And then separately you have the iPad line, which is basically your slower, lower featured
0:20:34and cheaper version. And that's treating them like laptops instead of treating them
0:20:40like iPhones where they're currently treated, which also means that last year's model
0:20:44is no longer what's for sale for cheap, instead it's just the lower product line
0:20:47model
0:20:48that's for sale for cheap. Yeah, that all makes sense because they've shown that
0:20:52they're
0:20:52willing and able to add features on the high end and so
0:20:55they've already done it essentially themselves by for creating the line. It's not just a
0:20:59naming difference, it's not just a size difference. The iPad Pro is different in
0:21:02fundamental ways
0:21:03from the rest of the line. So I think you can move the pencil all the way down, but the
0:21:07smart connector in particular, the whole idea that you're going to treat this as
0:21:10more of a Microsoft Surface style system, more of a laptop replacement, like that Apple
0:21:16has finally gone there instead of being like, "Well, some people like to use it and you
0:21:21can use a Bluetooth keyboard and blah blah blah."
0:21:22Like, no, there's a connector for it, it's a keyboard, we sell it.
0:21:26We fully expect you to use this more like a laptop.
0:21:29Eventually we'll get the OS support there.
0:21:31But like I said, I think the pencils can go all the way down if they want, because I don't
0:21:33think pencils are a pro feature.
0:21:35I think they just happen to have started off there.
0:21:38They can go all the way down the line.
0:21:39I think they could go all the way down the line to the phones and it would be fine.
0:21:43With customers anyway, if not with Apple.
0:21:45But the other things like, "Oh, we've got tons of RAM and we've got the really high
0:21:49refresh rate for drawing."
0:21:50You don't need that if you're just going to use a stylus like on the Galaxy Note or
0:21:54whatever.
0:21:56And the smart connector and the keyboard support and whatever else they do.
0:22:00The whole idea of a high-end product means not just capabilities, but if we have a choice,
0:22:07regular ones for consumers we're not going to shove like four gigs of RAM in
0:22:10them because we don't think they need it but for this one we are because we want
0:22:15you to be able to run pro level applications and they can start by
0:22:17forgetting the software as well they get the real benefit from it where why is
0:22:21someone going to buy a thousand dollar iPad well what if I told you that there's
0:22:24special applications that only run on the pro line and then people can write
0:22:27software just for the pro line that takes advantage of all these fast memory
0:22:30and fast faster CPUs and more memory and whatever other capabilities they want to
0:22:35give. Yeah, I kind of like the idea of, and I wonder if some of this is just thinking
0:22:44that the iPad doesn't behave like a phone market, it behaves like the tablet market,
0:22:49or I mean behaves like the laptop market or the computer market, they've got the longer
0:22:52refresh cycles and all that, so it's like, let's name them like we name our laptops.
0:22:57We don't keep last year's MacBook around. We don't do that. Well, there's that one
0:23:05with the non-retinas. Other than the one for education that's just sort of like, "Please
0:23:09don't buy this," but, you know, schools want it, so we're going to sell it. But, you know,
0:23:14the new MacBook retinas don't come out, and then the old MacBook retinas are still for
0:23:18sale for slightly cheaper. Like, they don't do that. Instead, they've got the MacBook
0:23:23Pro. Well, they did that with the MacBook Airs, too, right? No, but the MacBook Air
0:23:26got updated. The MacBook Air actually got updated, right? Which is weird, but again,
0:23:31I think that's a price thing.
0:23:32It got the innards bumped a little bit, but they didn't go retina with it.
0:23:36It was what they would have done.
0:23:37So they sort of kept that line around because they weren't entirely confident in its replacement.
0:23:42It's a transitional product here, but yeah, but it's not last year's models.
0:23:47It's this year's model of this thing that's going to go away.
0:23:50But they did bump it a little bit, right?
0:23:51Whereas the iPhone, it's just sort of like, yeah, it's last year's model, but it's $100
0:23:55less, so you could buy it.
0:23:56I feel like that's what they're trying to do with the iPad is maybe go in that direction
0:24:00if that rumor is true, that just say, you know, this is how we're going to do it,
0:24:04is it's differentiated by product lines, and within the product lines there are different
0:24:07sizes, but that's what you get to buy. You can buy the cheaper ones or the more expensive
0:24:12ones that are a little bit nicer, but you've got what we've got here and not the one from,
0:24:19you know, you can buy the three or the two or the one or whatever. With a mini, it's
0:24:22like you can buy the four or the two.
0:24:24But you're thinking they're gonna keep two versions of what used to be the full-size
0:24:30iPad, one with the smart connector that's called the Pro and one without that's not?
0:24:35It's not in the rumor, but I kind of feel like they've got to have a full...
0:24:39I don't understand how you could take the current iPad Air, make a new one, and call
0:24:45it an iPad Pro and not still have an iPad Air or maybe just iPad that's also available,
0:24:52because that is, by all accounts, as far as I can tell, the mainstream iPad. That is the
0:24:59one, it's the classic one, and it's probably the best-selling one. And I feel like, you
0:25:04know, why would you make that a pro? Not everybody is going to want a pro, so it seems like that
0:25:10makes sense to sort of say, "Well, the new one is a pro, but we're going to keep the
0:25:15old one around. Maybe it's the Air 2, maybe it's the Air 1. We're going to keep it around,
0:25:21you know, those are your choices. You can get this regular one or you can get the Pro one.
0:25:26Yeah, that makes sense for now anyway. Yeah, it's hard to get there. I would still like to see the lines
0:25:30extend, like the Pro to get more Pro-y and for the low end for them to drive that down more.
0:25:36I agree. Because they're still kind of hanging on to the idea that like the Mini is like,
0:25:40"Well, the Mini is just as good as the Air 2, it's just a smaller size." And it's like,
0:25:44you can make that Mini a lot cheaper if you backed off a little bit on that and just to recognize that it's an actual low end device.
0:25:51I feel like that's where they're going with this. The question is how committed they are
0:25:55to that and how low do you go. And that's the mystery because they haven't done something
0:26:01like this before, I think. But there's room. I mean, observers of the tablet market suggest
0:26:07that cheaper—one of Apple's problems is that they rule the premium tablet market,
0:26:14but there's this huge other tablet market that is not a place that Apple wants to play.
0:26:18So does Apple want to push down there with the iPad?
0:26:21If they've got a pro line, can they afford then to sort of take the regular iPad line
0:26:26down a little bit in scope?
0:26:28And maybe they can.
0:26:29Maybe that's good.
0:26:30Oh, see, they didn't do it on the Mac.
0:26:33They never really went super low-end.
0:26:35The Mac LC, never mind.
0:26:37They never went for the really low end.
0:26:39They never made a netbook.
0:26:40They never actually made a Mac that was this cheap, right?
0:26:42But with the iPod line, they totally did.
0:26:44The iPod line, they said, "Sure, we'll sell you a shuffle for 50 bucks."
0:26:47So they tried on the iPod line to go with pretty much as low as you can go.
0:26:50I mean, maybe it wasn't $25, but they were selling you an iPod for $50 for $49.99 or
0:26:54whatever.
0:26:55They went low end on the iPod.
0:26:56Did they – I mean, it was – I don't think it really helped that much or hurt that
0:26:59much, the iPod, but it was an experiment for Apple to say, "Let's take this product
0:27:03line on the iPod that we've diversified, and then we can kind of see the growth curve
0:27:06and it's kind of going away, but you know what?
0:27:08Let's go all the way down, as low as we can go.
0:27:11How cheaply can Apple make a thing and still call it an Apple device, but really get a
0:27:15price point that's like just a little more expensive than an iPod sock. Yeah.
0:27:19It's hard to compete against the six-pack of Amazon tablets, but it's, you know,
0:27:25but they aren't iPads, right? So it'll be interesting to see if they go
0:27:29this route, what they do and how low they do go. Yeah, yeah, we'll see.
0:27:37We'll see. It gives them some room. Although, I would say that, yeah, Apple
0:27:43never made a netbook, but they have experimented in how low they can go. Like, the fact that
0:27:48there is now always a Mac laptop available for just under $1,000.
0:27:55That's still a premium laptop. It is, but Apple didn't used to go down that
0:27:59far with their laptops. It used to be you had to get $1,299 or $1,399 to get into a
0:28:04Mac laptop at all. And now it's less. They're not immune to PC pricing. PC pricing
0:28:09has come down so much. The average selling prices of computers has just gone so low that
0:28:16they have to be pulled down a little bit. And then you break under the four-digit price,
0:28:20and that's kind of important. Plus, really, you're going to get argued back up there by
0:28:23your friends telling you to get a Mac with more RAM anyway.
0:28:25Sure. But I look at that and I think, well, that's sort of what this is, which is tablets
0:28:30are exerting pressure to come down in price. But it's still, you know, they're not going
0:28:34to go too low. They're not going to sell a six pack.
0:28:39make the iPad shuffle with no screen. It would be really cheap to make.
0:28:42Super easy. Alright, well, I want to do a sponsor. Let's do that. And then we'll
0:28:50talk about some topics and probably have room to talk about pizza at the end because, you
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0:31:04I just bought some pillows and sheets from Casper that are coming tomorrow. You excited
0:31:10me with your discussions of Casper pillows on ATP, so I'm trying those out.
0:31:15It's pretty neat. I like the advancement of pillow technology instead of just being
0:31:19a sack stuffed with stuff. Yeah, pillow stuff.
0:31:23Now it's multiple sacks, I'm led to believe. I don't know. Anyway, it's cool.
0:31:27Yeah, they got a whole technology thing there. So yeah, I'm looking forward to trying that stuff out.
0:31:31Now that I got the mattress, I figured, just let's just go all the way. Let's just all Casper all the time.
0:31:35Okay, so we're going to come back to pizza. I have pizza down as a topic, because why not?
0:31:43But I thought we would talk about home tech a little bit. This is one of those things where
0:31:48every now and then on ATP, I feel like you're talking to people who don't understand you.
0:31:56and that maybe I'm more like your people than they are in the sense that I, like you, have a TV and a home theater set up
0:32:10and I care about how my TV settings are and you know, Casey seems to not care if he's watching soap operas.
0:32:17So I thought maybe we would talk a little about tech in our homes, especially entertainment stuff, because you and I are not cable cutters.
0:32:25cutters, we have TiVo's, we have lots of other little boxes, and I thought it would
0:32:29be interesting to talk about that a little bit since we have that in common, and that
0:32:32a lot of our colleagues, like Myke is a, basically a cord cutter who only watches, he seems to
0:32:39maybe watch a little bit of video on TV now, but he basically doesn't understand why
0:32:42a TV exists, he would rather just watch TV shows on an iPad.
0:32:46So.
0:32:47He just watches YouTube on his phone held two inches from his face.
0:32:49Yeah, well I get the sense that he's watched all of Seinfeld, like, sitting on a couch
0:32:54with an iPad, which as it was meant to be, as it was foretold in the old times. So you
0:33:00have a TiVo Romeo, right? Like I do? Is that right?
0:33:03Yeah, I have the whatever the fanciest one is.
0:33:06Yep, yep, me too. Me too. And when I hear you talking about this stuff, you were mentioning
0:33:12Plex on there and how Plex on TiVo does some things and not others. I think the Plex app
0:33:17on TiVo is limited to 720p, which is kind of infuriating. I think that's the case.
0:33:23We're on Apple TV.
0:33:24I think it might just be the menus that it's limited to, but I'm pretty sure it down mixes
0:33:29everything to stereo, so it's a non-starter.
0:33:32Yeah.
0:33:33I love my TiVo.
0:33:34I want to say that it seems totally passe to talk about a TiVo.
0:33:41This is an old product.
0:33:42TiVo's been around since like 2000.
0:33:43It's just a DVR or whatever.
0:33:44I can get one from the cable company.
0:33:46But I really kind of love it.
0:33:47I find I use that.
0:33:48That is my primary device for entertainment on my TV now.
0:33:53I do have the Apple TV and I use it some, but most of the time I'm watching, even when
0:33:58I'm watching streaming, I, most of the time it's coming through TiVo because they've got
0:34:02the Netflix app and the Hulu app and the Amazon app.
0:34:07And so a lot of the time I end up just using the TiVo and the TiVo OS having support for
0:34:12like this show is on Hulu.
0:34:14Would you like to watch it on Hulu?
0:34:15And it just sort of plays through to the Hulu app.
0:34:18So I'm, I'm, I'm really happy with it.
0:34:21It sort of eliminated a lot of the use cases I used to have for the Apple TV.
0:34:25Yeah, they've been getting better.
0:34:27Like they have a million apps on TiVo, but most of the time I would not use the TiVo
0:34:31for those things.
0:34:32If I had any other choice, I would use some other box.
0:34:35But they've been getting better.
0:34:37Like I think, you know, and the tail end of the previous generation Apple TV, it started
0:34:41to really be unreliable for me.
0:34:44The old Apple TV used to be my go-to Netflix box because the TiVo Netflix client was just
0:34:49really slow and took a long time and would crash sometimes and just, you know, and the
0:34:54Apple TV one was much more slick and nice, but eventually just like we learned, you know,
0:34:58"Oh, let's watch a thing on Netflix," and you go to the Apple TV and get some weird
0:35:01error or the thing doesn't start, and eventually I said, "All right, well, now it's time for
0:35:05TiVo to have a shot," and the TiVo Netflix app was slow to launch and weird, but it would
0:35:10play the show, and eventually it started to win, and then the TiVo Netflix app started
0:35:13to get better.
0:35:14It's still not as good as the one on Apple TV, especially the new Apple TV.
0:35:18But sometimes TiVo is also our main thing.
0:35:22That's basically our input number one on the television and the receiver.
0:35:26If you're already there, sometimes it's just easier to go to the Netflix app there than
0:35:29switching inputs and going to the Apple TV.
0:35:32But mostly I'm watching recorded shows on the TiVo, and so that covers a lot of my and
0:35:36my children's television watching.
0:35:38Yeah, well, I've discovered that although I can watch HBO Go and all of that, but I've
0:35:43got the shows on the DVR, so I just watch them on the DVR.
0:35:46likewise I've got Hulu so I could watch shows on Hulu but I've got I recorded
0:35:50them I end up watching recorded and they TV was up there game I on the software
0:35:54side a little bit like the the apps like tea like the Netflix app in the hulu app
0:36:00are better but they've also they added the integration where it knows those
0:36:03episodes are streaming and there's a shortcut to take you to the streaming
0:36:07app it'll launch the app it'll take you to that episode in that app so I'm
0:36:10impressed by that and then on the live TV stuff they added the oh oh that's
0:36:16only in certain markets though it's like in in San Francisco you don't have the D
0:36:18button yet do you? Oh, for skipping commercials? Yeah. No, we've got that. Do you have that
0:36:24feature where you get to the... Yeah, I think they rolled that out. Have they rolled that
0:36:27out to everyone now? That's so great. So when it gets to the end of a part of the show and
0:36:33it goes into the commercial break, a little thing comes up that says press the press D
0:36:38to skip all the commercials and it's for supposedly it's like in primetime-ish for the top like
0:36:4420 most watched channels because they've got to have like a sweatshop somewhere
0:36:48where people are just like putting in the time codes of all the commercial
0:36:52breaks and if you watch a show right when it's on it's not there but like an
0:36:56hour or two later the skip information gets put in but that's such a great
0:37:01feature because you can you know you can watch the commercials if you want to and
0:37:06you can skip them if you want to you whether you I know you were a big
0:37:09thirty-second skip guy and I kind of went back and forth between you know
0:37:12badoop badoop badoop or just 30 second skip, but now you just press the button and it just
0:37:17jumps over all the commercials. And that's a great feature too.
0:37:20Yeah, it means people without my amazing 30 second skipping skills can successfully skip
0:37:25commercials. Even a child, so easy that even a child can do it. My son controlled the remote
0:37:29the other day and he just pressed the D button when the thing comes up and it says skip.
0:37:33Of course, like, this is leading to their UI having, you know, I don't know what their
0:37:37UI is thinking, like how many badges can you fit at the end of a thing? Like they've already
0:37:41got the HD one and now we have the skip one. As soon as there's not going to be any room
0:37:44left for the title, there's going to be a series of badges and then like a colored dot.
0:37:47Well, also how many things can they overlay on the picture? Because you have when it goes
0:37:51to commercial it puts the skip to D and then it's got that other stupid feature which is
0:37:55like smart speed sort of in Overcast where it's like watch the show but slightly faster,
0:38:00which I don't understand that at all. I don't know why anyone would want to watch that.
0:38:04They've got a lot of TV to get through. They really need to go faster.
0:38:07Yeah, I've got advice for them. Just watch. Take a bad show that you don't like and don't
0:38:12watch it. And watch them all at the right speed instead of at this weird, compressed
0:38:19like, it's like those movies where they would, what was it? Was it in England that they did
0:38:25this the standards conversion thing where rather than like converting the frames, they
0:38:29would just play it faster or maybe it was taking movies and playing them on TV and you
0:38:34play them too fast. But it's that same idea. It's like, why are these people moving strangely
0:38:39fast? And the answer was, because we just didn't want to worry about the frame rate.
0:38:43We just played it at the new frame rate. It's not a good idea. Don't do that. But TiVo's
0:38:48got it there, and every time you press the play button, it brings up the thing that says,
0:38:51"Did you know that if you press this button now, everybody will talk a little bit faster
0:38:55and it'll be really annoying?" Yeah, I know that, TiVo. I don't care.
0:38:59Yeah, the main problem the TiVo apps still have is they all suffer in comparison to the
0:39:03native TiVo watching recorded television interface.
0:39:06Sure.
0:39:07So for example, like I've just finished watching the first season of Man in the High Castle,
0:39:11and I watched it through my TiVo on the Amazon thing, and every time you launch the Amazon
0:39:16app, there's no commercials in it, but there is a one minute and 20 second credit sequence
0:39:22that I would love to skip.
0:39:23Right.
0:39:24There's no D button to skip it, there's no 30 second skip.
0:39:27you can skip it, but it doesn't work the same way as the regular TiVo timeline works.
0:39:31You have to essentially fast-forward, you know, 2x, 4x, whatever, and like—
0:39:34Because these are all these Opera—they're basically HTML apps.
0:39:37They're like Opera web apps, so the UI is totally unlike anywhere else in the TiVo when
0:39:42you're in those apps.
0:39:43And it's not as good.
0:39:44It's not as responsive.
0:39:45No, it's not.
0:39:46Whereas on the Apple TV, even though the apps all seem to vary a lot, all of them have a
0:39:50fairly responsive scrubber that responds to the swiping of your thumb, and most of them
0:39:54I'm seeing to respond to the 10-second forward skip thing in a similar level of responsiveness,
0:39:59whereas the TiVo, it's like, it's clear. Am I using the real TiVo, or am I using one of
0:40:03those weird apps? And the weird app ones just are much more delicate, and you can't really
0:40:07perturb them, because you might be seeing some spinners, and you might not know what
0:40:11you're skipping to and from, and you might have to wait a while to catch up.
0:40:15You know, the real horror is I have a 4K TV, which, you know, it was cheap.
0:40:24And my TV—so, listening to you and knowing we're in this era, as you talk about on ATP a lot,
0:40:30where the plasmas are gone, but the new, wonderful TVs aren't here yet, my TV died.
0:40:38And I was like, "God." I was hoping it would hang on, but it just—it died.
0:40:42It's like fry. You've gone to stasis for five years. I know, just don't watch TV for a while.
0:40:47Be like Myke, just watch things on my iPad for a while.
0:40:50I mean like fry in Futurama, like go into stasis.
0:40:53One of those little things frees you, you wake up, it'll be five years later.
0:40:56President Trump, what? But give me a TV and I'll be fine.
0:41:01So I went to Costco and I bought a Costco TV and this was my strategy.
0:41:07Basically I'm not going to pay too much for this muffler.
0:41:11That was my strategy. I was like, "Look, I just want a TV. I don't care if it only lasts a few years. I don't care. I just want to have a TV until I can one day buy a really good new TV that's going to be fancy and let me see in all the colors that I can't see."
0:41:25What did you get, a Vizio?
0:41:26I got a Vizio 4K that was decently reviewed. I stood there. I did the thing where you stand in the middle of the TV department at Costco and look up reviews on your phone.
0:41:37And there was a Samsung TV that was about the same cost that was rated similarly, and
0:41:42then there was this Vizio one, and it was a 4K TV.
0:41:45And I thought, "Well, that's got more Ks, so I'm going to get that."
0:41:49And you know, it's not bad.
0:41:51I have bought a couple other Vizio TVs at Costco, and what I would say about them is
0:41:56Vizio TVs have gotten a lot better since the first one I bought.
0:42:00I would say that.
0:42:02Wow.
0:42:03So much better.
0:42:05they're cheap and for like I've got a TV out here in the garage that gets used
0:42:08rarely but it does get used and that it's a good it's a good use for it but
0:42:13for the main TV so I got this 4k TV and it looks pretty good and the UI isn't
0:42:18fantastic but it was the price was right and it looks pretty good and it's got
0:42:22this 4k so it's like okay 4k what can I do with that is that anything can I can
0:42:28I even discern the difference in quality but the the thing about it is how do you
0:42:32get 4K content onto a 4K TV. Right now you could buy, I guess Amazon has a 4K
0:42:38Fire TV you can get now, but when I bought this TV that wasn't out yet.
0:42:41The answer is Netflix and Amazon's apps that are built into the TV support 4K
0:42:49streams. So sometimes I watch Amazon and Netflix content not on my TiVo or my
0:42:56Apple TV but on like an animal on the TV app on the TV set itself yeah like you
0:43:05should do the math on for the viewing distance I'm pretty sure that you're not
0:43:09getting any benefit resolution you may be getting a better from the wider color
0:43:13range or the more flexible frame rates depending on how this stuff is created
0:43:18but you're probably getting stuff subtracted by the massive compression
0:43:23of those streaming services you're using.
0:43:24So overall, it's probably about a wash, but you might get better.
0:43:28And the other problem is the slightly wider color ranges that are supported by the 4K
0:43:32televisions, the content may not be mastered that way, so it may not be helping you.
0:43:37And the other thing is, even if it is, and even if they send it that way, the television
0:43:40that you bought at Costco may not be able to even display that whole range.
0:43:43So it's probably a wash, but it's probably not hurting you too much.
0:43:47And that is, of the two possible viable strategies for buying TVs now you picked one.
0:43:51is get the cheapest television you possibly can. You didn't even do that because you
0:43:54got a 4K. It would have been better if you just got a much cheaper 10E.
0:43:57Well, that was the thing. I almost got the Samsung, which was basically within $100 of
0:44:03the price and was not a 4K TV but was well-reviewed and was in the ballpark. But it was that I
0:44:11wanted to be good enough that I feel like I'm going to enjoy watching this TV and this
0:44:15is not a long-term investment. Just get me through until there are better TVs. Although
0:44:20I gotta say, having bought these three TVs over the course of the last, whatever, six
0:44:24years, they are a lot better than they used to be. Like, that first Vizio TV that I bought
0:44:30was so bad. Like, the black levels on it were so awful, and even just the LCD TVs have come
0:44:37a long way. But about the 4K, my thought—and I haven't tested this, and I actually haven't
0:44:44even looked up it, it may or may not be true—it's very hard for me to test this, like, do A/B
0:44:49of this because the amount of time it takes for me to switch from like
0:44:51daredevil here to daredevil there and compare the 4k you just kind of can't do
0:44:56it
0:44:56my thought is that the 4k stream is probably a higher bit rate than the 1080
0:45:02stream that you know 2160 stream it's probably seeking to a higher bit rate
0:45:07basically the way Netflix works you know it's scaling based on how much it can
0:45:11get across the pipe and you might get something that starts in 480 and then
0:45:15goes up to 720 and then goes up to 1080 and if you're watching on a 4k TV
0:45:18it will then keep going and it will go up to 2160. And so my thought was, "Well,
0:45:25maybe what I'm getting here is a better quality picture because it's able to,
0:45:30you know, the 4K stream is a higher resolution, but also even though it's
0:45:35heavily compressed, more bitrate than the standard 1080 stream." That could also be
0:45:41totally fiction because it's very hard for me to tell. I cannot say surely that
0:45:47I'm absolutely seeing 4k level of detail on this. It's like, oh no, no, no. I totally see the 28,
0:45:53no, 2180. No, it's, it's not, no, I can't say that. I think it may be a placebo, but my hope is that
0:46:01it looks better in general. I don't know. Yeah. And you still haven't had a television with decent
0:46:07black levels in your house. I know you, the LCDs have gotten better, but it's kind of a good thing
0:46:10that you've never seen what these shows are actually supposed to look like, including on your
0:46:14Max by the way. The Max don't have the great black levels either. That's not true though because
0:46:17I think you know this that I the land of the forbidden television fruit is Arizona where
0:46:25when my parents when my parents moved into their house five years ago they bought two huge beautiful
0:46:32Panasonic Plasmas and I was down there the other week and I was it was when the Expanse was on
0:46:38and I decided I was going to watch the Expanse when I was down there rather than waiting and
0:46:43and I told Lauren, "Go ahead and watch The Expanse, and I'm going to watch it down here,
0:46:47and when I get back, we'll compare notes about it." And I watched that, and that's a space
0:46:50show, so there's a lot of black outer space stuff in it. And I watched it on that huge,
0:46:55like I don't even know what it is, 70-inch plasma in my mom's living room. Oh my God,
0:47:00right? It's just like, so I've seen, you know, I've had a few years to know what the black
0:47:05levels look like on a TV.
0:47:07You should never have looked at it. They're even more impressive on OLEDs, of course.
0:47:11I should never I should avert my eyes whenever I go down there. It's a beautiful TV
0:47:14I told my mom if she ever decides to move to a smaller house. I would like to take that plasma
0:47:18It's not gonna fit in your entertainment center. You're gonna have to tear down that whole side of the room and I will
0:47:23And instead there will be a giant TV. It's erected on a wall and it will be good. I
0:47:29Don't know. It's a it's funny. I'm happy with the the TV. We got whether the 4k is a real thing or not
0:47:36It looks it looks good. It looks better than the TV we had and
0:47:40And, uh, you know, that's, that's good enough for now.
0:47:44I, I, what I find funny talking about giant TVs is every time I shop for a TV,
0:47:49I say, no, no, it's gotta be bigger than the last one.
0:47:51Cause the last one wasn't that big.
0:47:52It's like that old Steve Martin routine.
0:47:54Do you remember that?
0:47:55Where it's like, I got, I got mono and then I got stereo and the mono sounded
0:47:59like, sounded terrible.
0:48:00So then I got a quadraphonic.
0:48:02Then that sounded, you know, made, made stereo sound terrible.
0:48:04And then I got like Google phonics where I have a thousand speakers,
0:48:07but now it sounds terrible too.
0:48:08I feel like that with TVs.
0:48:10Like I keep saying, "No, no, no. It needs to be a bigger TV. Oh, no, no, no. This one will be a little bit bigger.
0:48:14This one will fit in the entertainment center, so next time I'm going to get one that sort of sticks out the sides,
0:48:19but it'll still fit on the base, so it'll be fine."
0:48:21And I still have that now, where I got the—so I got this TV that's several inches diagonal bigger than the last one,
0:48:27and now I look at it and go, "Eh, it could be bigger. It could be bigger."
0:48:31Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the TV manufacturers do that for you, because, like, when I bought my big TV,
0:48:38Which is not even that big the smallest size it came in was 55
0:48:42That was the smallest and that was like so much bigger than any television I'd ever had before
0:48:46I'm just waiting until the small size you can get a 65
0:48:48I mean, I don't know if they're gonna go there, but the minimum size for the good TVs is
0:48:53Going up and up and it's at the point now where you can't even buy small televisions
0:48:57Like yeah want to get like we wanted to get a television for our bedroom that was smaller but not crap
0:49:02It was impossible because I don't want a 55 inch television in my bedroom
0:49:06Can you have a small TV that doesn't look like crap?"
0:49:08And the answer is no, we don't make those up.
0:49:09I recommend the iPad.
0:49:10Again, we'll go back to the mic method.
0:49:12No, the iPad is not a good TV.
0:49:13No, I agree.
0:49:14I agree it's not.
0:49:17Myke will disagree with that.
0:49:18But no, it's hard.
0:49:19I mean, just display-wise, just like it does not perform well as a television, ignoring
0:49:24the fact of the size and how close to you.
0:49:25Because I do watch things on the iPad, like not things that I care about too much, but
0:49:30rewatching old television shows or whatever, I do watch them on the iPad, and it's fine,
0:49:34but by no means is this a good television. Yeah, I looked at the small TVs when I was
0:49:40at Costco and I was kind of aghast because yeah, there's below a certain point you're
0:49:44like in novelty TVs. It's like, I guess you could have a tiny TV, but it's also a microwave
0:49:50and has an FM radio. Yeah, it's like a kitchen TV and it's like, you can make it look good.
0:49:55Like it's still going to be cheap, but you just put a decent size, but you know, it's
0:49:59not the way the economies of scale work, I guess. Like they have the lines that are making
0:50:02television they have to make up a certain size to make their money back
0:50:05and they don't want to sell you one for 200 bucks that's 40 inches or 30 inches
0:50:09yeah and that's now a small TV that's the funny thing 40 inch TV yeah a little
0:50:14shrimpy could do could do more well I've got some more stuff to talk about but I
0:50:21would like to take a break I think maybe now it's a good time to tell you about
0:50:25something else that's cool as Casey Liss might say this episode of upgrade
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0:53:08purchase and you will show your support for UPGRADE. Thank you to Squarespace for their
0:53:12support of UPGRADE and all of Relay FM. I feel like it's a miracle that I didn't at
0:53:18any point call them Sparesquace in that ad, Jon, because that's what the guys at the Flop
0:53:22House do.
0:53:23It's their own fault for having a confusing enough name to confuse Dan McCoy
0:53:29lots of simple words confuse Dan McCoy though, so
0:53:33Yes, we should I loved I will say this a little follow-up to I loved you and Merlin talking about
0:53:40Flophouse on
0:53:42Reconcilable differences, which is a great podcast that
0:53:44Reconcilable differences the podcast that I think man
0:53:47I don't get to talk about any of this stuff on any of the podcasts I do and I do a lot of podcasts
0:53:52but they're all about stuff.
0:53:53- You just gotta keep making up podcasts
0:53:55until every single thought that enters your head
0:53:57has an outlet and a podcast.
0:53:59- Well, you would think that I would have already had
0:54:00all of those things, right?
0:54:01You think I would have covered it, but I haven't
0:54:04because all my podcasts are sort of about stuff
0:54:07and "Reconsiderable Differences" is not about that stuff.
0:54:10It's just about life.
0:54:11It's like Myke and Casey do on "Analog."
0:54:14It's just about feelings and growing up
0:54:17and being a parent and stuff like that.
0:54:19So it's a great podcast, people should listen to it,
0:54:21But you guys did talk about Flophouse and I thought it was really endearing that the
0:54:24first time you just assumed that everybody knew that you were huge super fans of the
0:54:28Flophouse. And so you gave it a little tough love about like the sound quality problems
0:54:32and all that and Merlin referred to it as like that weird show. And then the guys who
0:54:36did the Flophouse heard that.
0:54:37That wasn't tough love. We were explaining why we loved it. It just didn't sound like
0:54:40it but we were.
0:54:41Well, yeah, but you know fans sort of like can talk. It's like talking to a member of
0:54:45your family. It's like you don't protect them quite as much, I think. You're like, "Yeah,
0:54:51know, I love the flophouse. Of course, you know I love it, so when I tell you that it's
0:54:55got all these terrible technical problems, I'm saying it with love, right? But I felt
0:54:58like maybe that got lost in translation a little bit, where they're like, you know,
0:55:02I think Dan McCoy is a little, who edits the episodes and sets up and is the recording
0:55:07studio and he's the designated technical guy. I think he is still bugged by the fact
0:55:12that they are riddled with technical problems when they record that podcast. So you guys
0:55:16came back the next time.
0:55:17Well, it is a comedy show.
0:55:18Yeah, it is a comedy show. It's not a tech podcast. They're not tech experts. They're comedians.
0:55:22Well, so in a comedy show, though, they can be laughing with you or they can be laughing at you,
0:55:29but in both cases they're laughing, so success! Yeah, exactly. But two weeks later you had to
0:55:34come back and explain your love again for the Flop House, which I thought that was sweet. Our
0:55:39friend Steve Lutz from The Incomparable took your advice ultimately and listened to the Flop House
0:55:46from the beginning and it says that he likes it now. He's like in episode 60 or something.
0:55:53Yeah, and he tried to say listening from the beginning was a mistake, but now he has done it.
0:55:58Like, it's an important thing to have done. Like, puberty is probably a mistake too,
0:56:02but you're glad to have done it. Sure. Okay. I'm just gonna let that go.
0:56:07I mean, consider the alternative. Exactly. That's right. Would you want to stay 11 forever?
0:56:13Peter Pan? I don't think so. The other thing I wanted to talk to you about is about the future of the Mac.
0:56:21You know, we could go on forever about it and I don't want to do that, but I think it's worth at least touching on.
0:56:25I was thinking of you when I read that blog post about the WWDC wishlist from Steve Trotton Smith,
0:56:31who, I mentioned this last week I think on Upgrade, used the phrase "OS 10 is a dead platform."
0:56:39And I just was interested in what you thought about sort of overall, you know, where is the
0:56:44Mac today and where can it go from here? Where should it go from here? Where will it go from
0:56:50here if it goes anywhere? Because Steve Trotton Smith's point is sort of like all the OS X
0:56:55advancements in the last few years have been sort of keeping it in sync with mobile. And that's not
0:57:03particularly exciting. And then you see sort of like the Mac App Store being kind of rotting on
0:57:09the vine. And there's a real question about like, is the Mac done? Are we just sort of like, it's
0:57:15not like we can't keep using it, but is there more to be done there? Or is it just this thing that's
0:57:19gonna sit there and be what it is for the rest of its life? Does it have more change in it? Or is
0:57:27this sort of all that it will ever be? And you know, you and I have been using the Mac for since
0:57:32time immemorial so I thought I would ask you what do you think about that?
0:57:35There's always more to be done on the Mac like you can always make it better there are
0:57:40plenty of things wrong with it where it can be better but in terms of the future of the
0:57:44platform outside any sort of artificial constraint where Apple could decide to do of course whatever
0:57:51it wants to do but outside of anything like that it's not dead until something kills it
0:57:56in other words if there are things that you can either only do on a Mac or do much more
0:58:01easily on the Mac, that means that the other platforms have a way to go before they prove
0:58:06that the Mac is a dead platform. It's not as if just because there is a new platform
0:58:10and a new way of doing things that is better in some ways, that you should ditch the other
0:58:15one. So again, Apple could decide to ditch the other one to sort of force the issue,
0:58:17but we all know right now that there are certain classes of things that are either only possible
0:58:22on the Mac or so much easier on the Mac that if we were forced not to use the Mac to do
0:58:26them, it would be a handicap. And no one wants to make themselves less efficient or less
0:58:31capable to sort of prove a point. So it's up to the other platforms, whether it's iOS
0:58:38or any other platform from any other company, to show that the old way of doing things with
0:58:43personal computers is not valid. And I think we all know, technologically speaking, however
0:58:47you might want to describe it, there are attributes to what we currently know as personal computing
0:58:53that will surely live on regardless of what the future is. If the future is all iOS-type
0:58:59devices or tablets or whatever, as we can see tablets like the Microsoft Surface and
0:59:05the iPad Pro and stuff sprouting keyboards, that's kind of a confirmation that regardless
0:59:09of the future, surely there will be a role for something like a keyboard in the future
0:59:13of computing.
0:59:14Does that mean that the Mac will live forever?
0:59:15No, but it does mean that, hey, that whole idea from the PC world of having a keyboard
0:59:19that you type on, that's probably a keeper.
0:59:21Like maybe, you know, that still has some life in it.
0:59:25Maybe it goes away entirely when we have thought control or whatever.
0:59:28But for now, no matter what the future of the platform is, keyboards are good.
0:59:32Mouse — indirect pointing device.
0:59:34Touch is good.
0:59:35Touch is much better for tons more things than the mouse is.
0:59:38Pen input is also good.
0:59:40Mouse is also pretty good too.
0:59:42It's a precise pointing device.
0:59:43You can use it on large screens or whatever.
0:59:45I think the jury's kind of still out on it, but in general right now, you're not going
0:59:50to get rid of the mouse until something can do everything the mouse can do better.
0:59:54Oh, I don't need the mouse anymore because X and so far the answer to X has been because I have a finger or stylus
0:59:59And that's not really you know that they don't do all the same things right so
1:00:03It's you don't want to tie up like the Mac as a particular platform and OS X as a particular OS with all the technology
1:00:10So I just look for I just look at the capabilities and say if I didn't have a Mac
1:00:16What would I use to do these same things and would it be just as good or better?
1:00:20Because that's what you're looking for you're looking for just as good or better. You're looking for progress
1:00:23progress. It's not just going to switch over entirely. And the wrinkle in that is that
1:00:28the Mac does continue to get better. How can the Mac get better? It can get more stable.
1:00:32God knows it can, you know, more reliable, not crashing-wise, but it can do its job more
1:00:37predictably. It can get faster. It can always get faster. It can get more capabilities that
1:00:43it can have that other devices can't. Right now, still, the Mac has a higher power
1:00:49envelope than its competing devices, whether they be laptops or iOS devices, which means
1:00:55you can put bigger, hotter things in there, which means you can have better graphics for
1:00:58games and faster CPUs.
1:01:01Not much better graphics for games, not much faster CPUs, but still, it's ahead.
1:01:06When that all evens out and basically the fastest processor you can get in the entire
1:01:09world fits into a phone's power envelope, that will be another strike against the Mac.
1:01:13But then you've still got the ergonomic issues in terms of how big of a screen can I put
1:01:16on it?
1:01:17Do I have to hold the screen?
1:01:18with me? Does it have a big keyboard? What about a precise input with the pointing device?
1:01:22Besides the stylus and a finger, can I use a mouse?
1:01:25So I'm not particularly worried because it seems like Apple has its head on its shoulders
1:01:30about not sort of artificially deeming this to be the end of the road for the Mac and
1:01:36from now on they're just going to make iOS devices because I think they know if that
1:01:40happened, then everybody who currently uses a Mac would not be, their needs would not
1:01:45be as well filled by other devices that Apple sells and they would go buy something from
1:01:50some other manufacturer and Apple's like, "No, you can keep buying a Mac, we'll keep
1:01:53making them, you keep buying them until we ourselves, Apple, come up with something that
1:01:57is better than the Mac in all ways, or at least as good or better in all ways, we'll
1:02:02keep making and selling Macs."
1:02:03And that's a smart decision by Apple and that's why OS X is currently not a dead platform.
1:02:10My concern though is that, I was thinking about this when I was writing my review of
1:02:14iPad Pro that my concern is that the Mac is becoming a... that it's limited in how much
1:02:25it can change, not just because it's a mature platform, but because it represents stability
1:02:31in a world of change. And this is an imperfect metaphor, but you know, I feel like sometimes
1:02:37the Mac is like CBS where there are there are like way more cutting-edge TV
1:02:44shows on cable and CBS could try to put on a show that was a cutting-edge show
1:02:50like you'd find on cable and it's its viewers would reject those shows because
1:02:55they don't want that they want the comfort of the thing they've come to
1:02:59understand as a TV show which is CBS now CBS is profitable and it's and it's and
1:03:04it's healthy and it's a very successful business, but they are also trapped in
1:03:10their success in the sense that you know they are not going to push the envelope
1:03:14forward. The rest of the industry is doing that in various pockets, but their
1:03:19their audience loves them because they are what they are. And that's it's not a
1:03:24perfect metaphor, but that's my concern about the Mac is that you can't radically
1:03:28rethink what the Mac is because they're already radically rethinking computing
1:03:32with iOS. The Mac is more like, for people who prefer a computer like we had
1:03:38in the old days, the Mac will always be here. Which I think is a good thing as
1:03:43somebody who's been a Mac user for 20-plus years, but it does sort of make
1:03:48you ask the question, is there something it can do that's new or is it all just
1:03:53sort of, you know, it could be faster, it could be more stable, it could just keep
1:03:57doing the stuff that it's already doing, just do it a little bit better.
1:04:01I think you're underestimating the flexibility of people who use personal computers or Macs
1:04:06to get their jobs done.
1:04:08If you just think of, I mentioned before, the idea that Apple would say, you know, MacOS
1:04:1310 is going to be the foundation for the Mac platform for the next 15 years.
1:04:17I think that Mac users today would absolutely accept another MacOS 10 style discontinuity
1:04:24in the operating system, which if you think about it, discontinuity between what we know
1:04:27as classic MacOS and OS 10 was tremendous.
1:04:29I mean, they were the same OS, barely in name only.
1:04:31Like the old OS ran in a little emulation layer until Apple could ditch it, and eventually
1:04:36it transitioned everything to essentially the next APIs and a new language.
1:04:40And it was just like, it was an amazing transition.
1:04:42They made it, but like, what does OS X have in common with the Mac now?
1:04:46So little if you were an old school Mac user.
1:04:49The spirit is there.
1:04:50They kept the Apple in the Apple menu, but that's only when we complained about it.
1:04:53It wasn't actually original even there in that.
1:04:56And some QuickTime APIs and some file system APIs and lots of stuff from carbon that's hanging around
1:05:00But a lot of that stuff is slowly deprecated but like really like
1:05:03Technologically speaking interface paradigm. It was just you know, and it was type of thing
1:05:08Okay
1:05:08Maybe Mac users back then were more willing to accept it because it was like look at see this of the company goes out of
1:05:13Business and we were missing some major new features, but for the most part
1:05:16Even diehard classic Mac OS users were like this is cool. Like when OS 10 came out
1:05:22Yeah, this this I don't you know, maybe I want my classic Apple menu back or whatever
1:05:26But the dock is cool
1:05:27The window system is cool that the whole sort of some of it people might say it's just fashion or whatever
1:05:32But it wasn't it was like we're rethinking
1:05:34What a personal computer interface should be looked at should look like we're changing the standard that basically I always
1:05:40Described it to people like a movie computer like you know how you see those
1:05:43Computers and movies that look ridiculous because some graphic designer comes up with an interface
1:05:47Well Apple built that like this is a real thing as a real working interface where you know
1:05:51Everything is double buffered and things magnify under your mouse cursor and everything is photo realistic and and zooming and squishing and doing like
1:05:59You know kind of like the iPhone was like a movie interface to of like things sliding around a touch interface that no one had ever
1:06:06Seen before and yeah, there was consternation from classic Mac users, but in the end we were like
1:06:11Okay, Apple show us the way this is the future of personal computing. Let's go with that
1:06:16It has been what how many years now 15 years more or less?
1:06:19I'm not saying Apple needs to radically overhaul OS X in that way. They have been slowly evolving it if you were compare
1:06:25You know the OS X today to 10.0. You would think that they're also very different operating systems, but
1:06:32an interface paradigm shift in the next five years where they rethink the whole idea of
1:06:37the dock and the finder and the menu bar and a lot of stuff like
1:06:41Maybe or like you said maybe they just decide this is a stability thing
1:06:45We'll just keep it until we can replace it, but they have to do one of those they have to say
1:06:48They have to increase the capabilities of the iOS line until we can all do our jobs
1:06:53better or at least as well in that interface paradigm, which is forgetting input device
1:07:00just in terms of are there files and folders and a dock and a bunch of windows or something
1:07:06else.
1:07:07We really need to advance those capabilities or they need to keep evolving the Mac as they
1:07:10have been.
1:07:12And don't underestimate the impact you can have on things like, "Oh, just make it faster,
1:07:16just make it more stable."
1:07:18Like, there is a step change in a lot of those things.
1:07:20What does faster or more stable mean?
1:07:23You pick two different directions, right?
1:07:25So let's take the Mac and say, say Apple decides what's going to differentiate the Mac is going
1:07:29to be reliability.
1:07:31And all they do for the next five to ten years is just make it like bulletproof, like, you
1:07:38know, industrial grade sort of, you know, the most reliable thing you can imagine that
1:07:44just squash every ounce of every bug, every cosmetic glitch, everything that doesn't work
1:07:48how it's supposed to and it just works.
1:07:50And in comparison to our phones and iPads that are rapidly evolving, those will seem
1:07:54like pieces of crap and it'll be like, the Mac will become like the mainframe of the
1:07:57world where it's like, it always does exactly what it's supposed to do.
1:08:00They've removed as many bugs as they possibly can.
1:08:03Server-side thing will probably be a killer deal for this.
1:08:05But anyway, this would be one way to differentiate the Mac.
1:08:07Would be, like, is it going to be just that stable thing?
1:08:12a damn well better be stable and I will accept that it is not evolving at a rapid rate if
1:08:17I know that, you know, that this is the rock, this is the foundation, this is the boring
1:08:22stable thing.
1:08:23Or they could go in the other direction and say let's take advantage of our higher power
1:08:26envelope and just make everything lightning fast.
1:08:28Let's make iOS devices look like the slow crappy ramstar things that they are and let's
1:08:33find ways to accelerate the Mac taking advantage of the technologies that we have here to try
1:08:40to make the Mac just feel an act so much more responsive and whatever it is that is currently
1:08:46time-consuming on the Mac make it faster whether that's storage or you know some sort of like
1:08:52encoding tasks or graphics driven things we don't have the power envelope to do it on
1:08:56the phone that's probably a tougher sell because it's the personal computers are getting faster
1:09:03much slower than other devices are because other devices are creeping up on them like
1:09:07so it's harder to get more performance at the top end, but the highest end performance
1:09:11that you can fit in a phone keeps going up and up and up. So anyway, those are two possible
1:09:15directions to make the Mac—to differentiate the Mac as a platform, as opposed to simply
1:09:21sort of saying, "Well, it's going to be like it was," kind of going along at the
1:09:24similar rate that it was, but not really taking advantage of the fact that it isn't the
1:09:32tip of the spear anymore. I like the idea of refining what we have and making it that
1:09:41much better and using what traits the Mac already has that are its assets and using
1:09:47those to its advantage. I think that's great. I think in terms of doing another radical
1:09:51rethink, I guess that's sort of my point is I feel like Apple doesn't have it in
1:09:55them to do that because where they're exploring and where they're doing new things, the
1:09:59is all being poured into iOS for that. And that it feels to me like even if
1:10:04Apple wanted to give the Mac a radical rethink, I don't think they would
1:10:09because they don't have the energy for it. And I'm not sure the audience wants it either, though.
1:10:16I mean if you look at what Microsoft did with rethinking Windows, you know, there
1:10:20were several years of real pain where essentially their market rejected
1:10:25them and Windows sort of they had to back off of a lot of their attempts
1:10:29because the people who use Windows which are not Mac users they're a very
1:10:32different audience but still they said no no we don't want that we just want
1:10:36Windows we just want what we what we know and I think that there's some
1:10:38aspect of that in the Mac world too plus yeah the sheer number of iPhone users
1:10:45out there and the value the iPhone has for Apple as a company if you're going
1:10:48to innovate and if you're going to try lots of crazy new things you know the
1:10:53iPhone seems like the place that you want to pour all of your energy. It is
1:10:55your younger operating system. It is where there's the most action. It seems
1:11:00like the logical place to do it.
1:11:02Well, so the Windows 8 thing, like, when you're going to make a radical change to
1:11:07your most popular platform, which the Mac was the time OS X came out of Apple's
1:11:11primary platform, you have to have two things. One, you have to have the resolve
1:11:17that Apple has shown they have and Microsoft has not shown they have. Like, sort of the
1:11:20courage of your convictions to stick it out because it's not like people didn't
1:11:23complain about OS X in the early days. I was one of them. Like there was a lot of
1:11:26pushback from traditional Mac users, a lot of it, right? And Apple listened to
1:11:30some of it a little bit but in the end just kept plowing through. And the other
1:11:33important thing you need to have that Microsoft probably didn't have is you
1:11:36kind of got to be right or at least right-er, right? You know, it has to
1:11:39actually be better in the long run and it's debatable whether it was in
1:11:43Microsoft's case. Certainly they didn't have the courage of their convictions. They
1:11:46backpelled real fast and real hard and tried to come up with this compromise thing and
1:11:51maybe they end up in a better place for them or maybe they were just on the wrong track.
1:11:56You know, it's so hard to tell because you can't sort of A/B test the two different timelines.
1:12:00Although I'm not sure how that works in The Man in the High Castle because I never read
1:12:03that story and I'm only done through season one.
1:12:05But anyway, as far as I know, you can't A/B test the timelines to see how things turn
1:12:09out.
1:12:10So I think Microsoft is kind of a cautionary tale, but I think I have more faith in Apple
1:12:16to do both of those things well, to both have a better answer and also to stick it out and
1:12:23power through and to realize that the customers will be there on the other side.
1:12:27And they might be different customers, but that's fine.
1:12:30If you had to guess where do you think the Mac will go in the next like three years,
1:12:35what direction do you think they will take?
1:12:37I think it's conceivable in the short term that they do another branding-related thing
1:12:44tied to—I don't know what they're gonna tie it to—but like, you can—how long do
1:12:48you keep calling it OS X?
1:12:50When iOS gets to X, do you decide that you need to flip it for marketing reasons?
1:12:53It's time for Mac OS!
1:12:54Time for Mac OS!
1:12:55Oh, obviously, yeah, I know.
1:12:56Other than that, because if they do it, maybe they could drop the X then, too?
1:12:59I mean, that's just so uniform.
1:13:01But I'm thinking, like, aesthetically more.
1:13:04Like they did do sort of an iOS 7 style revive in Yosemite, but still, I don't know.
1:13:11I think there's a room for a lot of apparent "big changes" that really aren't big changes.
1:13:17They're mostly like changes in marketing and how it's branded and trying to present tvOS,
1:13:22iOS, and macOS with the lowercase letter in the beginning, all as this family of operating
1:13:27systems, as if it's some new thing, as if they haven't all been Darwin under the covers
1:13:31forever and all the other stuff.
1:13:34So there's a place for that, but I think that's not really going to be significant for users.
1:13:39And then, which direction are they choosing?
1:13:41Like it doesn't seem like they're really doubling down on stability.
1:13:44It seems like they still feel like every other year or so they have to do something to the
1:13:48Mac that they have features to tout or whatever, but I really hope they reconsider that.
1:13:53And you know, because if there isn't anything big on the horizon, right, besides the little
1:13:59lower casing the M and maybe dropping the X and stuff, if there isn't anything big on
1:14:03the horizon, then please do double down on the stability and bug fixing.
1:14:07Like we can go three, four years without saying, "Now you can, you know, mark up things in
1:14:12the whatever application."
1:14:14Like, just, you have a lot of features there.
1:14:16Make all of them work.
1:14:18And your current customers who like Macs will like them even more.
1:14:22And that is a, that is probably the safest strategy for the Mac if you don't have any
1:14:27great ideas for a Mac OS X style revolution in the next five to six years.
1:14:31And it just seems to me that Apple has its fingers in a lot of pies or whatever the phrase
1:14:35is these days that, uh, and the Mac volume, the Mac just doesn't sell in the volumes.
1:14:40I think it does that.
1:14:41They have their hands full just making the Mac the best Mac it can be and hurry up with
1:14:46these other platforms that you hope will eventually cannibalize the Mac because you have to make
1:14:49them a lot better before they can.
1:14:52Do you think the Mac needs a yearly marketing operating system update to hang a tab on or
1:14:58is that not necessary?
1:15:00Uh, it's probably fine.
1:15:04You can do that every year, have a new product and a new name, but stop with the expectation
1:15:09that you're going to have a bunch of feature bullet points.
1:15:12Just make it more like when in the car industry where the Honda Accord will go through a redesign
1:15:18and there will be several years in which it's basically the same Accord, they just change
1:15:22the front fascia, the plastic trim, maybe some of the options available, but it's the
1:15:27same car.
1:15:28have the generational turnover. They sell the same Honda Accord for many, many years,
1:15:32not just one or two years. So they could do that with the Mac, have a yearly release,
1:15:37but make it clear. I don't know how they make it clear. The marketing purpose, we understand
1:15:42that from year to year, don't expect like, "Is this the new generation of the Mac?"
1:15:46No, it's just another revision of the current generation of the Mac operating system. So
1:15:51that will give them breathing worm while still giving them something to say about the Mac
1:15:54on stage every year to see.
1:15:56Yeah, I was looking at the Wikipedia page for the Honda Civic and realized that I had
1:16:00a fifth-generation Honda Civic, I think. Or maybe it was a sixth generation, and now I'm
1:16:06driving an eighth-generation Honda Civic. But it's the same thing, where they've gone
1:16:12through like ten different generations of a Honda Civic, but they keep them around for
1:16:16like four or five years.
1:16:18Yep. I mean, that's what the car industry does, because the investment costs of a particular
1:16:22platform are so huge. Even if it's just a mild evolution of the previous platform that
1:16:25you need to recoup those costs, you want to sell it for several years. And like they make
1:16:29cosmetic changes every year, small cosmetic changes, small trim level changes, fixing a
1:16:33component with replacing component with more reliable one when they realize, you know,
1:16:38what may be. But in general, you're not getting the next generation car for several years.
1:16:44Yeah. Well, we'll see. I'm with you there. I think that they're welcome to call it a new
1:16:52name every year, but our expectations should probably change and they should not worry
1:16:56about like, "We've got 300 new features and we did this, we did that." Just, yeah.
1:17:03I mean, there's so many people who rely on the Mac. I don't know if the Mac needs
1:17:07to make news. I think it just needs to be good and keep getting better.
1:17:12And it can make news by being better and more reliable. The most compelling word of mouth,
1:17:20especially since they're not selling them anymore, like, you know, for money. But the
1:17:22most compelling word-of-mouth thing you can hear is, "There's a new version of the Mac
1:17:26operating system. I installed it, and problems X, Y, and Z that I used to have went away."
1:17:31That is a feature. If you heard someone say that, like, "Oh, you have to get this one,
1:17:35because the previous one, I had all sorts of problems, and I installed the new one,
1:17:38and those problems went away." And they want to ask you, "Okay, well, fine, but what new
1:17:41features does it have?" Like, that's a feature.
1:17:43- One of the banner features of El Capitan, I think, is the fact that on slow internet
1:17:47connections, mail actually will check your mail instead of trying to sync like
1:17:5120 IMAP mailboxes. And that was a feature that they trumpeted, that they
1:17:55went out of their way to tell me is, "Hey, it turns out that when you're on airplane
1:18:00Wi-Fi, Apple Mail was really inefficient." And as somebody who'd been on a bunch of
1:18:05cruises, I was already aware of this. But that was a great feature and that
1:18:11was a fix to mail to make it not behave badly when you don't have a
1:18:15super-fast connection. And you know what? That's a great feature, even though it is
1:18:20just a fix.
1:18:21Sure.
1:18:23Alright, well, I think we have just enough time for some Ask Upgrade, a special
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1:20:25for supporting upgrade and this week's edition of Ask Upgrade. The first item which I moved
1:20:33down here from higher up in the show is just pizza. Myke and I have been talking about
1:20:38pizza a little bit on the show, and I sided with Joe Steele on the pepperoni and pineapple
1:20:42pizza, which I enjoy greatly, which I am certain is not John Siracusa approved, but I was going
1:20:49to give you this opportunity to school me on what you decide real pizza is, and what
1:20:53you have determined real pizza is. This is not robot or not. This is slightly different
1:20:57than the podcast we do about whether things are robots or not. This is pizza or not, which
1:21:01I think as a single ruling is going to make it clear. I just want—before you speak,
1:21:05I was going to say, one time I had you over to my house and I made pizza, and I made a
1:21:13traditional sort of red sauce, mozzarella, and I think maybe there were pepperoni on
1:21:19it. And then I also made a barbecue chicken pizza. And my recollection is you said, "This
1:21:24is pizza, and this is some other thing that is not pizza." So can you educate me a little
1:21:28bit on what real pizza is?
1:21:31You and Myke talk about the pizza, it's like the blind leading the blind. The guy from
1:21:34the UK and the guy from California talking about pizza. So you might as well be talking
1:21:38about zebras. I had a lot of your vast experience with zebras that you both have.
1:21:41Well, there's the California Zebra Kitchen, so...
1:21:44Yeah.
1:21:45Yep. To my right, you left out the most salient detail of the pizza you had at your house.
1:21:50Was it both of them you can tell me? One or both of them had cheddar cheese on them?
1:21:54Well, the BBQ Chicken Pizza had cheddar cheese on it. The other one might have,
1:21:58although I will tell you that I was thoroughly cleared up about the proper use of cheddar
1:22:04cheese and pizza by you. And now, I will still put some cheddar in a barbecue chicken pizza,
1:22:10but the traditional red sauce pizza is only mozzarella.
1:22:14**Matt Stauffer** Yeah. So my whole pizza thing, like so many
1:22:17of my culinary things, it's all about where I'm from. I'm from the New York Metro area,
1:22:22up on Long Island. And all my rulings on all those foods are entirely based on what I grew
1:22:29up with, which I think is true of everybody who has some particular thing about some food,
1:22:35whether it's someone who grew up in the South and can tell you exactly how grits have to
1:22:38be, right? Or, I don't know, like crawfish from New Orleans, whatever it is. There's
1:22:44some local dish that is, you know, that you're from the area where that dish in America,
1:22:49where that dish is known to come from there, right?
1:22:52And so you kind of get authority in saying,
1:22:55and I would say the same thing, for example,
1:22:57about Chicago pizza, like this is not Chicago pizza.
1:22:59I can tell you what Chicago pizza is.
1:23:01I'm from Chicago and I, you know,
1:23:03you can sort of definitively say that, but in the end,
1:23:06it doesn't mean anything more than anyone else's.
1:23:11Like it only is what it is.
1:23:12You have to recognize that it's,
1:23:14that all you're hearing is this is where this food
1:23:18became famous or is most well known, and all this person is doing is telling you how close
1:23:24the food that you're eating and calling the same thing is to the place where this food
1:23:28came from and is well known. Everything beyond that, especially when it comes to California,
1:23:34is something else. Because California makes a lot of things that are like good food, like
1:23:39made with good ingredients, like not crappy food, that nevertheless are abominations of
1:23:43the original food item. It doesn't mean they're bad food and might not taste bad or whatever,
1:23:49but it does mean—and it's almost worse when they're good as opposed to someone making
1:23:53an abomination out of processed food and gross things—it does mean, though, that they're
1:24:00that food in name only, or that someone has heard a story about that food and then made
1:24:05it. They've never actually seen or tasted one, but they heard about it. And so this
1:24:09is what they've come up with.
1:24:10I was told if I put cheese and sauce on bread, it would be pizza.
1:24:13Right, exactly. So what kind of cheese? Does it really matter what kind of cheese or sauce?
1:24:18Can I take some other meal like hamburgers or fried chicken and put it on top of there?
1:24:22Yeah, why not? Turkey dinner, put it on top. Is that still pizza?
1:24:27So anyway, all of my rules are, and for the people who are from these areas, tend to be like a purist.
1:24:34This is the way it has to be, this is what you put on it, and you don't put other stuff on it.
1:24:38because the pizza seems so versatile. You can put anything on there, can't you? You
1:24:42can, but now you're making something different. Even Chicago pizza, for example, is not pizza
1:24:47by East Coast New York standards. It is a separate thing. They can have rulings about
1:24:51whether you're making a Chicago pizza, but it is so incredibly different.
1:24:54So the New York pizza is so simple. Like so many of the original places, it is boring.
1:25:01You know, it's just you got the dough, you got the sauce, which is always tomato sauce
1:25:05with a certain set of spices that is very limited. You've got the cheese, which is always
1:25:09mozzarella cheese, and you've got a couple handful toppings, and that's it. And within
1:25:14that frame, you can do it badly or you can do it well, and you're judge-based on that.
1:25:18But once you start branching out into like, "This seems like a, you know, I can do anything
1:25:23there. Like, I don't like mozzarella cheese." Well, then you don't like pizza. You know,
1:25:27I want to have pizza, but I don't like mozzarella cheese. Well, then make something else that
1:25:31you—that is inspired by pizza that you may enjoy.
1:25:32Flatbread with something maybe a delicious meal that you love like there are lots of interesting things
1:25:38You can put on top of things that are sort of dishes inspired by pizza
1:25:41But if you're ever gonna have any sort of ruling about like what is and isn't pizza
1:25:45You have to pick your definition and I pick my definition from where I came from
1:25:49Which is the place in America where a pizza was popularized and so that's what I go. So no cheddar cheese
1:25:56No, no barbecue. No barbecue chicken. Yeah, no turkey dinner. No, no cheeseburger
1:26:02burgers, no chocolate cake, no bacon, no...
1:26:06Yeah, so what toppings are allowed by you? Because so far, you have not ruled out my
1:26:11-- which I know you're about to -- you've not ruled out my pepperoni and pineapple.
1:26:15All right, so here's the twist in this. Where I'm from, the toppings are fairly straightforward.
1:26:22You've got pepperoni, sausage, olive. You've got things like meatball that are in there.
1:26:28You can't say that they're not because it's a topic that you can get in most places.
1:26:34And it doesn't stray much from – I mean, you've got peppers and onions and mushrooms,
1:26:37right?
1:26:38It doesn't stray very far from that, but there is what's known as Hawaiian pizza,
1:26:44which is pineapple and ham, right?
1:26:46Which is not pineapple and pepperoni, which is not a valid – but pineapple is as far
1:26:52out as the weirdest pizza that you have to say, "Is that included in one of the values?"
1:26:57Because you can get it in New York and most places in the New York metro area, even when
1:27:02I was growing up, chances are good if you ask for Hawaiian, you got a 50/50 chance maybe
1:27:06that the pizza place will know what that is and they will have it.
1:27:10Is it good?
1:27:11I never liked it.
1:27:13Did most people get it?
1:27:14No.
1:27:15I think it was probably more reviled than anchovy, which is also another valid topic.
1:27:20But it was for sale.
1:27:21So I have difficulty judging that.
1:27:25As far as I'm concerned, I feel like that was maybe the first chink in the armor of
1:27:29like—
1:27:30That's where it all went wrong.
1:27:32Right, right.
1:27:33But it was not something that I had never heard of.
1:27:37It's just something that I never chose to eat, but I saw other people eat it.
1:27:41So I'm going to rule against pepperoni and pineapple, which is just a made-up thing,
1:27:45but "Hawaiian pizza," quote-unquote, that's borderline.
1:27:49But you see, the difference between ham and pepperoni, these are salty pork-based—
1:27:55meats. They are not that different. There's a difference. They're not that different.
1:27:58They don't go—like, because with Hawaiian, what you're going for is that sort of—I
1:28:02mean, you've got the whole Spam, Polynesian, Hawaii type thing. Like, ham is different
1:28:06than pepperoni. It is just very, very different. It's not as good. It's not as spicy. It's
1:28:10not—just—yeah. So I feel like both of them, for me, it's not my thing or whatever,
1:28:17and I think the only way you can sneak in is going with Hawaiian and saying it's ham
1:28:21and pineapple. Pepperoni and pineapple, I feel like you're just making things up.
1:28:24Well, it's a Hawaiian where they— It's like saying bacon and pineapple, or
1:28:29even sausage and pineapple. Those are not combinations. That's not Hawaiian. Only ham
1:28:34and pineapple. My parents would always order what I've considered
1:28:37to be the most baffling pizza ever, which is beef and onion. So it's like ground beef.
1:28:43What does beef mean? It's ground beef. It's basically like sausage.
1:28:46No, that is not a topic. See, you can't just take ground beef and put it on top of
1:28:51It's not—apparently you can.
1:28:53And then onion.
1:28:55And I find I don't understand it.
1:28:56I'd never heard of anybody.
1:28:57But you can apparently get this in lots of places, a beef and onion pizza.
1:29:00I don't know why you'd want to.
1:29:03I don't know.
1:29:04I don't know.
1:29:05Well, see, the variance in pizza across the country.
1:29:06The other problem is, even if they're using all the ingredients, you think of just plain,
1:29:10straight up mozzarella cheese, tomato sauce, and dough.
1:29:14There's such incredible variation in just those three ingredients, such incredible,
1:29:18vile variation.
1:29:19There's no safety in like, you have no idea what you're getting.
1:29:22And so once you branch out, even the New York metro area, meatball pizza was the most dangerous
1:29:26because what do you, how do they make their meatballs?
1:29:28There's sort of no standardized, what is a meatball?
1:29:31You kind of have an idea of what it's supposed to be like in Italian meatballs.
1:29:34A meatball is like a big ball.
1:29:36How do you even put that on the pizza?
1:29:37Do you chop it up?
1:29:38Do you make little mini meatballs?
1:29:40You make them smaller, sometimes they're cut in half.
1:29:43It's weird.
1:29:44That's the other thing.
1:29:45Like, in Italian restaurants in the New York area, I would never get spaghetti and meatballs
1:29:48because the variation in meatballs from restaurant to restaurant was just fantastical.
1:29:52It could be any kind of meat. They could have onion or celery or other kind of crunchy stuff
1:29:57in them, which I always hated. Or do they have breadcrumbs?
1:29:59Yeah, there's a lot of variations in that. So it was not really safe to get. But most
1:30:05of the toppings are olives or olives. All the vegetables are basically the same. You
1:30:11very often cut the same way. Pepperoni, even though there's variations in quality, you
1:30:16kind of tell pepper when you're eating it and when you're not eating it. Sausage, Italian
1:30:19sausage seems to be a little more consistent than meatballs. It starts to vary. Pineapple
1:30:23and ham are pretty consistent, too. But around the rest of the country, they can't even get
1:30:27like the sauce or the cheese or the dough right. And so forget about their toppings.
1:30:31Who knows what you're going to get?
1:30:33I use some wheat flour along with white flour in my dough, so that probably puts me in the
1:30:36crazy California side, too.
1:30:38You are in California, so I'm like, "Why wouldn't you?" I mean, why not put sunflower seeds
1:30:41in there while you're doing that? Put some avocado on top.
1:30:43Yeah, I mean we know about avocado. I can tell the rest of the country they're doing it wrong when it comes to avocado.
1:30:48If you're putting it on pizza, you're doing it wrong.
1:30:50And mission style burritos. Those are those are our local foods that we can control.
1:30:53All right, well, this is why we talk about robots on Robot or Not. This has been Pizza or Not as part of Ask Upgrade.
1:30:59I have a couple really quick Ask Upgrades that I wanted to get your thoughts about.
1:31:02One is from Bobby who says, "What comes first? True family iCloud photo libraries, a new file system, ding, or a full iTunes rewrite?
1:31:12What would be your prediction?
1:31:13Which one of those will come first?
1:31:14Oh, I'm going to predict the new file system first.
1:31:18Not because I think it's imminent, but just because full iTunes rewrite just.
1:31:22It just seems like it's not even a glimmer in anyone's eyes, but it's, it's hard to tell.
1:31:27Like, and I follow libraries.
1:31:28They've done so much with photos lately and they, they probably feel like that they've.
1:31:34That that need doesn't exist anymore because of like the shared streams.
1:31:37It does.
1:31:38It still exists.
1:31:39I agree.
1:31:40I feel like that there's an iTunes family piece that's still going to keep dropping
1:31:43of like all the other stuff getting integrated into into family iTunes accounts.
1:31:49But all that stuff is like the photos one especially probably doesn't feel as pressing
1:31:54to them because they just made such a massive improvement to photos that it's time to like
1:31:58refine and build on that.
1:32:00I asked them about it too.
1:32:02I asked them about it and they brought up something that I thought was interesting which
1:32:05was who's to say that everybody in a family wants to share photos?
1:32:09Which I thought was like, okay, interesting take on that.
1:32:11Like your kids, do your kids really want all their pictures dumped into your photo library?
1:32:15You should have said to them, we're not talking about the whole family, although that does
1:32:18happen for when the whole family goes on vacation, but surely in families that have more than
1:32:22one parent, which I believe there are a lot of in the world, surely the parents want to
1:32:28share the pictures they individually take of their children.
1:32:31That is a common use case.
1:32:35So you're going to say file system.
1:32:36So anyway, yeah, so I'm going to say File System just because it's been so long in coming.
1:32:40It hasn't arrived.
1:32:41It hasn't improved, whereas iTunes has been improved many times over, and it seems like
1:32:47I'm not even sure they know what they want to do with iTunes.
1:32:49And the photo library, they just made such a huge, massive change to it.
1:32:51I feel like it is conceivable, 2017, that you could introduce a new file system, and
1:32:56it's conceivable that by 2017, neither of those other two things happen.
1:32:59So I'm picking File System, but it could be wishful thinking.
1:33:02I'm going to pick the family iCloud photo libraries, because I do feel like there's
1:33:05another shoe that's going to drop, that they've been working to add more features.
1:33:08Now that they've got the family feature out there, that we're going to see
1:33:12additional stuff thrown into it, I'm hoping that we're going to get a shared pool of data
1:33:16for iCloud and that we are going to be able to opt to have photo libraries go across accounts.
1:33:22That it won't be mandatory because, you know, again, my daughter doesn't want to share her
1:33:26pictures with us and that's fine, but my wife and I would like to be able to share our pictures.
1:33:30And right now you kind of can't because to be logged into some things on your iPhone,
1:33:34you can't be logged into other things. You can't really use two IDs for everything.
1:33:38So, you know, we can't do that right now. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna predict that also
1:33:42because I feel like although it's work, it's, there's a lot of behind the scenes work that's
1:33:46already been done. Whereas a new file system and a full iTunes rewriter, such huge projects that
1:33:51I'm also gonna think that maybe this is a thing we're already watching it happen. And it'll just,
1:33:55it'll, it'll tick that box as it moves forward with the iCloud family stuff. Cause they,
1:34:00I hope on the file system is that they have been working on it for years already.
1:34:04Yeah, that's true.
1:34:05Many, many years.
1:34:06Well, maybe so.
1:34:07Maybe we'll get all of them at WWDC in June, right?
1:34:10Sure.
1:34:11No, not this year.
1:34:12And I thought, like, iCloud Photo Library, like, I was saying, like, it is just a big
1:34:16improvement.
1:34:17It used to be that you had to designate which computer was the iPhoto computer.
1:34:21Remember those days?
1:34:22Oh, yeah.
1:34:23Like, oh, Mom's computer is the iPhoto computer?
1:34:24Now we've made such an improvement, now you designate which Apple ID is the photo's Apple
1:34:29ID.
1:34:30is actually a really big improvement, because at least it's portable with the Apple ID and
1:34:34not tied to a piece of hardware or anything like that.
1:34:37But yeah, when I think about how it should work with families, it's not obvious what
1:34:42is the best interface.
1:34:43We all see the need.
1:34:45I don't want to do the current dance that I do to try to somehow bring over the pictures
1:34:48that I take on my phone to get them into the family photo library, which uses my wife's
1:34:52Apple ID and everything.
1:34:54But full sharing of everything is also the wrong answer.
1:34:59And how do you present an interface that so people don't get confused about where the
1:35:01heck their photos are?
1:35:02It's actually, it's a pretty hard problem, but it is a very pressing need.
1:35:06Yeah, I just, the iCloud family stuff was introduced only last year.
1:35:12So I feel like there's going to be that year two of now we're going to do this, but you
1:35:18know, that is also, I got to, I'm doing a lot of wish casting when I say that too, because
1:35:22I really want those features to be there and they may not be there.
1:35:25listener Mahir wrote in to say "What is your most played song in iTunes?" and
1:35:30give us the reported play count. I will go first. Modern Love by Matt Nathanson
1:35:36is the number one on my iTunes. It says I have 214 plays of that, but records are
1:35:42spotty, you know, that doesn't cover... until iTunes match started syncing plays
1:35:46across devices, you know, I would delete things and add things and listen on
1:35:50different computers and none of it would stay in sync. Now it all stays in sync,
1:35:53but that really is only so for the last year and a half. I did used to do audio
1:35:59Scrobbler to last FM, so I went there and I haven't done that in two years, but
1:36:03there were several years where everything I played on my Mac at work
1:36:05especially got Scrobbled to last FM, and I looked it up and the most played
1:36:11track there was "Let Go" by FruFru. Also 214 plays, which I find just kind of
1:36:17peculiar. So those are mine.
1:36:19What about you, Jon?
1:36:20Yeah, I just want to reiterate my lack of faith in the play counts.
1:36:25Because first of all, they all seem way too low.
1:36:28Second of all, I'm not even sure—I do subscribe to iTunes Match, and I have since the beginning—but
1:36:31I'm not even sure that they're really syncing the way that they should be.
1:36:36And third of all, like I said, the numbers just look weird and inexplicable, and just
1:36:40all way too low.
1:36:41So I've been listening to iTunes since iTunes existed, since it was on, you know, classic
1:36:45Mac OS, but surely these play counts don't account for that.
1:36:48So I have no idea what range these play counts are in.
1:36:51But anyway, my number one is REM's Perfect Circle for Murmur.
1:36:55Play count is 321.
1:36:57All right.
1:36:59Yeah, I love play counts, actually.
1:37:03And it's funny, I don't pay attention to them much anymore, because for so long they were
1:37:06irrelevant, because they didn't cover my iPod plays, and they didn't cover the different
1:37:11Macs and they wouldn't sync, and then I'd remove something from my library for some
1:37:14reason, and then bring it back and the play counts would be gone.
1:37:17But since they did iTunes Match, Apple has actually synced play counts with all your
1:37:24devices, apparently.
1:37:25So yeah, I mean, my number three is down to double digits already.
1:37:30So these can't be right.
1:37:31Wow.
1:37:32Yeah, that can't be right.
1:37:33I have a whole bunch of things in the upper 100s.
1:37:39So yeah, I don't know.
1:37:43It turns out there's a song that I play—this is something I have in common with Merlin,
1:37:46A song I play when I'm in a certain mood, especially at the beginning of the day.
1:37:51It's kind of a dark or angry mood.
1:37:54I play "Something I Learned Today" by Husker Du, and it's got 113 plays.
1:37:59So that's how many times I've been in that mood lately.
1:38:04It's in the top 20, anyway.
1:38:05It's not in the top 10, but it's in the top 20.
1:38:08Yeah, the other complication is playing songs in the car for kids, because my number two
1:38:13is "Let It Go From Frozen."
1:38:14Of course it is!
1:38:15Yeah.
1:38:16Of course, I also listen to it myself. I'm not going to put all those plays on my kids.
1:38:20I like that song. I do listen to it in the car, but a lot of those are job-related.
1:38:24Sure. A listener, Rob, wrote in to say, "Do you think Amazon is working on an Amazon video
1:38:31app for the Apple TV?" And Rob would like to watch Doctor Who again, which is, Doctor
1:38:35Who is moving to Amazon as an exclusive, the new series of Doctor Who. Myke and I talked
1:38:41about this a lot. What do you think? What's Amazon's strategy here? Do they want their
1:38:46They're on iOS.
1:38:47Do they want to be on Apple TV?
1:38:48Do they want to sabotage Apple TV?
1:38:51What's going on?
1:38:52>> I try to handicap this.
1:38:55I try to think about how many people are like us and how many people are more like a single
1:39:01box household.
1:39:02Because my experience of television for the past many years has been, "Let's see all of
1:39:08the various applications on my various boxes compete against each other."
1:39:12Who has the best Netflix client?
1:39:13who has the best Amazon Video client, right?
1:39:16I mean, because down to my TV, my TV can play Netflix, my TV can play Amazon Video, so can
1:39:22my TiVo, so can my Apple TV, so can my PlayStation, so can my Wii.
1:39:27And I'm just picking among them, and they change, like who's got a good app this week
1:39:30or whatever, but at no point am I like, "I really wish I could watch Amazon Video, but
1:39:34unfortunately I don't have a box that can play it.
1:39:37I have like seven boxes that can play it."
1:39:38And am I the aberration?
1:39:40Because I have a million boxes connected to my TV, and most people can't support that
1:39:42because it's ridiculous and most people just have like one thing like they just have their
1:39:46cable box maybe and then maybe one other thing and that they're somehow being stopped from
1:39:51watching Amazon I guess that I mean maybe that's more common than what I have but it
1:39:55just seems ridiculous to me that Amazon would withhold their application from Apple TV for
1:40:01any reason other than spite because it seems like yeah it's pointless you're not I don't
1:40:06think they're selling more fire TVs because of it people because those people who have
1:40:10only one box? They have only one box because they don't want to have a million boxes. And
1:40:14you know, they're just going to live without it then. And it's stupid. Amazon, if they're
1:40:18going to be a content company, if they're going to pay to have Man in the High Castle
1:40:22made and pay all this money for the new Top Gear, the show from the old people that did
1:40:25Top Gear or whatever, you got to get your show out to as many people as possible. I
1:40:28mean, even Apple made iTunes for Windows. You can't be like that. If you're going to
1:40:33produce content, you need to get it everywhere, like Netflix. Netflix was like, "Do you have
1:40:37a box that an electric cable goes into, we want a Netflix client on it. They want it
1:40:42everywhere. That's the right strategy, and I think eventually Amazon will see that. So
1:40:46I would predict that Amazon will eventually be on Apple TV.
1:40:49Steven: I think they're working on it. They're on iOS. Of course they'll be there eventually.
1:40:54Maybe there's some politics around when they go, but I think it's going to happen. I think
1:40:58it's inevitable.
1:40:59Steven, off-screen Yeah, if it is spite, it's stupid.
1:41:01Yeah, oh, agreed completely.
1:41:03That's a terrible reason.
1:41:04Uh, listener Lucas has our final question today, which is what topics can you
1:41:10only discuss when Myke is not around?
1:41:13Pizza, please.
1:41:14Pizza.
1:41:15Definitely.
1:41:16Um, let's see what else pens are dumb.
1:41:19I don't like pens and, uh, Myke was wrong.
1:41:23Uh, big phones, the iPhone six plus is no good.
1:41:26The iPhone six asks forever until the next iPhone.
1:41:30That's not huge.
1:41:31Any other terrible things we could say? Well, USA. USA. We can do that.
1:41:37Well, Myke is not around. I don't know. I feel like you could talk about most of these things with him.
1:41:43It's true.
1:41:44I don't know if there's anything you can't-- It would probably be something that he's not interested in.
1:41:47Is there anything that you're interested in that he would just roll his eyes and be bored and have nothing to say about?
1:41:52Well, we talked about boxes that you attach to a television to watch things. He's totally not interested in that.
1:41:57What about baseball?
1:41:58baseball. Oh yeah, yeah, but you're not that interested in baseball either. I know, but
1:42:02for you, what could you talk about? If you had someone on who was really into baseball,
1:42:06you're not going to have these deep conversations with baseball with Myke. Honestly, the iPhone
1:42:106 and 6S Plus, that's a thing that I can't really have when he's around, because he just
1:42:15won't stop talking about how he's right. And I just don't agree, I don't like that big
1:42:21phone. I mean, it's not a right or wrong, as you pointed out, it's personal preference.
1:42:25personal preference does not match his. But yes, baseball—we had a great question last
1:42:29week about sports, or as they say in England, "sport."
1:42:33They only have one there. They have lots of maths, though. Lots of maths, only one sport.
1:42:39It's an interesting dynamic.
1:42:40They have a real cardinality problem over there.
1:42:43Yeah, they have priorities. They've got more math and less sports, and we went the other
1:42:47way, so that's sort of our cross to bear, I think. But he didn't even have a point when
1:42:53he was 10 where he had a David Beckham poster on the wall. He's just never been interested
1:42:57in it, which is fine. Lots of computer nerds, lots of people in our culture are like that.
1:43:04I'm not one of them, but there are a lot of people out there who just didn't ever do.
1:43:07He said, "Don't play it, not interested in it." And I said, "Well, I don't play it."
1:43:10I played basketball in the eighth grade. I was on our team, seventh and eighth grade
1:43:15basketball. That was my last venture into organized sports, but I still like sports,
1:43:20even though I can't play them. I don't know. Things about how England--well, even insulting
1:43:26England I could probably do around Myke, because his accent keeps drifting closer and closer
1:43:30to the United States.
1:43:31Yeah, yeah. We'll change him yet.
1:43:34Yeah, we'll reform him. He did refer to sports last week, and not sport, which I felt was
1:43:41an ultimate betrayal to all of our British listeners who should find him.
1:43:45He can't help it. I was trying to say, it's like when you have a conversation with somebody
1:43:49who, you know, you say "gif" and they say "jif," and it's like a battle of wills to
1:43:53see during the conversation. The conversation is not about that. You're just talking like
1:43:57at work about something. This happened more when we actually used to use gifs on the internet,
1:44:01right? But you were just discussing something, and it is almost impossible to have an ongoing
1:44:06conversation over the course of a week with two people who say it differently. One will
1:44:09break, and when talking to the other person, conform to their way of saying things. And
1:44:15So it's your job to hold strong with the American pronunciations and everything, and eventually
1:44:19he'll break.
1:44:20Yeah, it's Jeff, by the way.
1:44:23This episode of Upgrade, brought to you by Casper, Squarespace, and MailRoute.
1:44:28Thank you to our sponsors.
1:44:29You can reach me at Jason L. Myke is imike on Twitter.
1:44:31Of course, our guest John Siracusa is Siracusa on Twitter, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Siracusa.
1:44:38And you can reach him at ATP.fm for Accidental Tech Podcast.
1:44:41and of course at Real FM he has "Reconsidable Differences" with Merlin Mann. And at TheIncomparable.com,
1:44:47not only can you find many episodes with Jon, but of course Jon and I do "Robot or Not"
1:44:51there. Every week we talk about why something is not a robot, usually. Jon, thanks for being
1:44:58on Upgrade. I appreciate it.
1:44:59Jon Sorrentino No problem, Jason. Anytime.
1:45:00Thanks everybody out there for listening. We will see you next week and Myke will be back in the UK. Bye!
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